We are all born with a desire to talk and to be talked to. Listening to other people talk and thereby sharing their emotional experiences is also a desire we are born with and this desire has been exploited in motion picture film and television in which voice sounds are essential. But until recently, voice sounds were seldom used in video games, because of the large amount of memory required.
Human players have long been able to control what characters do and what actions they perform in prior-art video games. But adding voice sounds and talking animated picture sequences to prior-art video games is not enough to simulate a face to face voice conversation. Talking video games such as Wanderers From Ys have animated cartoon sequences that alternate with side-scrolling skill-and-action sequences in which some of the characters talk. Although the actions of some of the characters can be controlled by a human player, characters do not yet talk to each other using words selected by a human player to comment on what they are doing or planning to do.
Talking video games that allow human players to participate in dialog between animated characters that stir human emotions like dramatic films will have lasting appeal, because they will satisfy a basic human desire, the desire to talk with other people.
Prior-art talking video games are disclosed in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,305,131; 4,333,152; 4,445,187 and 4,569,026.
It is well known for human players to input choices using any of a variety of input devices such as push buttons, rotatable knobs, pressure sensitive membrane, proximity sensitive pads or screen overlay, light pen, light sensitive gun, joy stick, keyboard, mouse, track ball, moving a cursor or crosshairs or scrolling through highlighted options, speech recognition, etc.
The characters in video games and computer games, especially role-playing games, are of two types: player-controlled characters (or player characters) and non-player characters. A player-controlled character is a human player's animated surrogate or proxy and does what the human player chooses to have him do. Non-player characters are not directly controlled by a human player, but can be indirectly influenced by a human player, either by responding to input from a human player or by responding to what a player-controlled character does or says.
In the prior art, each choice by the human can be immediately followed by a synthesized voice or digitized voice recording that speaks the words selected by the human player, so the human will quickly adjust to the fact that the spoken words he hears for his side of the dialog are initiated by his fingers rather than his vocal cords.